eLife and PREreview have announced their collaboration with the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) to implement the COAR Notify technology, with the support of Arcadia – a charitable foundation dedicated to promoting open access to knowledge. This partnership seeks to reinforce connections between preprint review and curation services, fostering a more robust 'publish, review, curate' ecosystem for authors, journals, and the wider scientific community.
The COAR Notify Initiative, launched by COAR in 2021 and 2022, aims to promote community adoption of a standard and decentralized approach to link research outputs hosted in different repository networks with external services, such as overlay journals and open peer review groups. This initiative relies on the COAR Notify Protocol, which acts as the 'technical glue,' enabling seamless connections between these services through established web-based technologies Linked Data Notifications and Activity Streams.
By leveraging the COAR Notify Protocol, eLife and PREreview intend to enhance their systems, providing a shared infrastructure that supports the 'publish, review, curate' model, with a primary focus on preprints. eLife, a prominent publisher, currently publishes preprints as Reviewed Preprints, presenting public reviews and eLife assessments alongside the work. This approach emphasizes the importance of curation and aligns with the organization's work on Kotahi, an open-source platform developed in collaboration with Coko for managing preprint submission and review.
PREreview, a platform that enables collaborative and constructive peer reviews of preprints, plays a pivotal role in engaging the scientific community in open peer review. The COAR Notify Initiative will facilitate seamless linkages between preprints hosted on different platforms and open review groups, aligning with PREreview's mission to encourage transparent and inclusive preprint evaluation.
The integration of the COAR Notify Protocol into bioRxiv/medRxiv, SciELO Preprints, Kotahi, PREreview, Sciety, and other platforms aims to support three core workflows within the 'publish, review, curate' ecosystem: Author-Driven Requests for Open Peer Review: Authors can request open, community-led peer review for their preprints; Journal-Driven Requests for Open Peer Review: Journals can solicit open, community-led peer review for manuscripts or preprints submitted for formal review and publication; and Ingestion and Display of Aggregated Preprint Review Requests: Platforms like Sciety will aggregate preprint review requests from various sources, including bioRxiv and other repositories, along with published reviews from preprint review platforms.
The COAR Notify model will enhance communication between these platforms, making it easier for multiple services to participate in the 'publish, review, curate' future for research.
The eLife and PREreview collaboration builds upon previous implementations of the COAR Notify Protocol, which has been adopted by organizations like Peer Community In, HAL (Hyper Articles en Ligne), and Episcience. As pioneers in this endeavor, eLife and PREreview hope to engage more reviewing groups globally and facilitate a collaborative approach to peer review.
This initiative marks a significant step towards reinforcing the integrity and openness of scholarly publishing, fostering a thriving ecosystem that encourages collaboration and innovation.
The project is scheduled to continue until at least the end of 2024, encompassing the integration of the COAR Notify Protocol into Kotahi and Sciety, further advancing the goals of 'publish, review, curate' for the benefit of the scientific community.
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